German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party on Monday (Sept 19) digested another stinging poll loss, in Berlin state elections, and the relentless rise of the right-wing populist AfD which rails against her liberal refugee policy.
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Merkel’s party won about 18 per cent of the vote in Berlin, not enough to allow it to continue as the junior partner in a governing coalition with the Social Democrats.
The anti-immigrant and anti-EU AfD party came fifth, but its score, of nearly 14 percent, saw it enter the regional assembly for the first time and showed that it is becoming a force to be reckoned with ahead of federal elections due next year.
The biggest European Union economy took in one million asylum seekers a year ago, and over 70,000 of them came to Berlin, with hundreds still housed in the cavernous hangars of the Nazi-built former Tempelhof airport, once the hub for the Cold War-era Berlin airlift. “From zero to double-digits, that’s a first for Berlin”, cheered the AfD’s top Berlin candidate, Georg Pazderski, predicting that the electorate would next year kick out Merkel’s national right-left grand coalition.
“We are firmly convinced that we will land in the Bundestag (national parliament) with a double-digit score” next year, AfD co-leader Joerg Meuthen said.
Many voters drifted further to the left and right, with the Left Party climbing 3.9 points to 15.6 percent.
“To ask this question one year before federal elections would be suicidal, especially since in the CDU there is no credible successor”, he said. Many in Germany see the influx of Muslim dominated refugees as the Islamic invasion of Europe.
“With the Berlin result, the AfD has consolidated its position and shown it can appeal to voters across the board – it is now represented in a big city, eastern German states and in more affluent western states like Baden-Wuerttemberg”, said Thomas Jaeger, political scientist at Cologne University.
Mueller, however, said after the results that “We have achieved our goal”. “The parties at the centre, the mainstream parties, have lost a lot of ground, spelling a shifting dynamic in the political landscape …”
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The Berlin election continued a trend of surging support for fringe parties, with both the far left and the right wing the winners of the day.
